James Hynes - Next: A Novel

Copyright 2010 by James Hynes

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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First eBook Edition: March 2010

Reagan Arthur Books is an imprint of Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Reagan Arthur name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

ISBN: 978-0-316-07260-1

Kings of Infinite Space

The Lecturers Tale

Publish and Perish

The Wild Colonial Boy

In St. James Street there was a terrific explosion; people came running out of Clubs; stopped still & gazed about them. But there was no Zeppelin or aeroplaneonly, I suppose, a very large tyre burst. But it is really an instinct with me, & most people, I suppose, to turn any sudden noise, or dark object in the sky into an explosion, or a German aeroplane. And it always seems utterly impossible that one should be hurt.

Virginia Woolf, Diary, 1 February 1915

She would not say of any one in the world now that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.

Mrs. Dalloway

Comes an age in a mans life when he dont want to spend time figuring what comes next.

James Coburn in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, screenplay by Rudolph Wurlitzer

AS THE GROUND rushes up to meet him, Kevin thinks about missiles again. One missile in particular, a shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile, blasted from a tube balanced on the bump where some guys clavicle meets his scapula. What guya Saudi? An Egyptian? A Yemeni? Some pissed-off Arab anyway, kneeling in the bed of a dinged-up pickup truck with Texas plates, or crouching on the springy backseat of a rented convertible on a dirt track just outside the airport fence. One of those portable weapons from Afghanistan, back when Afghanistan was somebody elses problem, called something, a Slammer or a Tingler or something like that. Kevin recalls that its the same name as a cocktaila Whiskey Sour? A Tom Collins? A shoulder-fired Banana Daiquiri? No, a Stinger, thats it! Four parts brandy to one part crme de menthe in a cocktail glass, or a fat olive-green tube that farts flame out the back while the missile erupts from the front, its backside trailing a wobbly spiral of smoke until the missile gets its bearings and climbs like a sonuvabitch in a long smooth curve into the heat-hazy Texas sky toward the sleek underbelly of Kevins plane, a Pringles can with wings, packed full of defenseless Pringles.

Trouble is, Kevins seen his fair share of movie air disasters. Used to be they just shook the camera and Ronald Colman or whoever would grit his teeth and bug his eyes and dig his fingers into the armrests, and then a wobbly model airplane would plow up a miniature of a mountainside in the Hindu Kush, breasting snowbank after snowbank like a speedboat. Now of course they rub your nose in it, and you see planes split apart from the inside: the skin peels away like foil, the cabin fills with flying magazines and gusts of condensation, oxygen masks dance like marionettes. Then theres the money shot, no movie air disaster these days is complete without it: the awful, thrilling, gut-wrenching cum of the whole sequence when some poor extra still strapped in his seat is sucked out of the plane, or a whole row of seats is yanked as if by cables out the ragged gap where the tail used to be and spins ass over tit into a freezing, fatal darkness.

But now its broad daylight, and Kevins flight from Michigan is coming down in Austin, Texas. He was even more worried about missiles during their predawn takeoff from Detroit Metro. How could he not have been, what with the security check-in line running out of the terminal all the way to the parking structure, and with every ceiling-hung TV along the concourse tuned to CNN or Fox, still streaming images from the bombings in Europe last Thursday? Crumpled subway cars, rows of bodies under sheets, cops and paramedics in orange vests, deltas of blood on pale, wide-eyed faces. The usual imagesfor all he knows they could be running file footage from earlier catastrophes: London, Madrid, Mumbai. Not to mention the usual grainy CCTV images of the usual round, dusky, beard-fringed faces of pleasant-looking young menthose people, Kevin cant help thinking, against his better natureguys only just out of adolescence, with a death wish and a remarkable talent for synchronization. Moscow, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, all within a few minutes of each other. And Bernwho bombs Switzerland? And Glasgow! If the first, botched attempt on Glasgow was farcea couple of pissed-off professionals torching a Jeep Cherokee, not quite enough to bring Western civilization to its kneesthis new attack was tragic, but it still felt unlikely to Kevin. Who knew Glasgow even had a subway system, and now Kevin remembers the name of Buchanan Street Station (a place hes never heard of before) as indelibly as if hed ridden through it every day of his life. Creeping in the check-in line through the terminal, he passed a Wayne County sheriff every thirty feet posed like a Cylon centurion in Kevlar vest and riot visor. At the checkpoint itself, he saw the surest sign of Orange Alert, a couple of paunchy Michigan National Guards in fatigues and combat boots, carrying automatic weapons and eyeing Kevin with a caffeinated gaze as he stood crucified in his stocking feet while a TSA drone swept him with a wand. Have a nice flight, sir!

And it didnt help that Detroit Metro is a ten-minute drive from Kevins favorite Lebanese restaurant in Dearborn, where no doubt some deeply disgruntled dishwasher dreams of airliners dropping from the sky like ducks in duck season, orwho knows?where some Al Qaeda sleeper out of an episode of 24 is waiting tables and biding his time for a chance to sneak out to a two-track behind the airport with a piece of cast-off American ordnance and blow one of his better customersand Kevins a big tipper, he used to wait tables himselfout of the sky. But now, deep in the privacy of his brainpan, in the plane descending over Texas, Kevin feels guilty for thinking this. Those peoplewhat a thing to say! In the cozy, progressive cocoon of Ann Arbor, where hes lived nearly all his life, you dont openly speculate about terrorists in Dearborn, not in polite society you dont, not even four days after a six-city European bombing spree. And if you do, its only to concede that it serves us right for looking the other way while our government handed out Stingers to radical Islamists in Peshawar like a corrupt Indian agent handing out Winchesters and firewater to angry Comanches in some glossy fifties western. Read your Chomsky, friend, were only reaping the whirlwind, and anyway, Islams a big, complicated religion like Christianity, its not a monolith, its not like every Muslim in the world wants you dead. Apart from the waiters in Dearborn, Kevin doesnt even know any Muslims, or at least he doesnt think he does. In college he slept a couple, three times with a girl named Paula who called herself a Sufi, but probably only to